


we pass the badge down (til it kills you)

by thatdamneddame



Category: Hawkeye (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Detectives, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Ficlet, Friendship, Gen, The Unusuals - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-13
Updated: 2016-07-13
Packaged: 2018-07-23 17:41:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7473642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatdamneddame/pseuds/thatdamneddame
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first time Kate Bishop meets Clint Barton, she’s just finished being a prostitute.</p>
<p>The Unusuals fusion ficlet</p>
            </blockquote>





	we pass the badge down (til it kills you)

**Author's Note:**

> I was cleaning out my wips file and found this. Stand alone, but I've had grand intentions of turning this into a full length fic for about three years now. Maybe one day.

The first time Kate Bishop meets Clint Barton, she’s just finished being a prostitute. It is not, she decides, Clint’s eyes flicking casually over her exposed thighs, her pushed up breasts, the best way to make a first impression.

“You always dress like that?” he asks, shrugging into a jacket, ignoring Sergeant Fury’s impressive one-eyed glare.

“Only when meeting new people,” she replies. Barton grins like it’s Christmas come early and Fury barks at them to get their asses into gear. The moment is gone before it can even begin.

It is not, Kate thinks later, drinking very terrible station coffee, the worst way to make a first impression either.

*

Someone killed a cop. It doesn’t matter that Kate never met the man. It doesn’t matter that Clint clears out a locker filled with girly magazines and cocaine. He was a cop, and you don’t kill cop in New York City.

*

“Listen, Katie,” Clint says, drinking straight from the coffee pot he keeps _in his desk_ , Jesus Christ, “keep your chin down, eyes open, and knees bent, and you’ll be fine.”

“Sounds like I’m doing somersaults,” Kate grouses, keying her password into her computer. No one calls her Katie. Not really. She’s not sure she likes it, but she’s not sure she hates it either.

“Something like that,” Clint agrees, before Romanoff comes in, perp dressed up at a hotdog struggling between her and Rogers, and then Clint is off making bets with her that he is sure to lose.

*

“Word of advice,” says Darcy, the beat cop who always seems to be hanging around, catching Kate on her way down the stairs, “when Stark and Rogers start to have a domestic, just stay out of it. It’s just how they do foreplay. Well, I think that’s what it is.”

Kate smiles her thanks. Romanoff had just taken one look at Kate asked, _You have a look at the coroner's report yet?_ , uninterested in gender and sisterhood and everything else that Kate sort of hates and sort of loves about being a woman in a man’s world.

“Any other words of advice?” Kate asks.

Darcy chews on her lip before deciding. “Thor doesn’t do inside voices. You won’t like Banner when he’s angry, and I think Romanoff once killed a man in Reno just to watch him die.”

“What about Barton?”

“Well on the plus side,” Darcy laughs, beginning to move up the stairs again, “he doesn’t look at your boobs when he’s talking to you.”

Kate waits for the other shoe to drop. “And on the downside?”

“I’ve got great boobs,” Darcy tells her. “Why isn’t he looking?”

*

It’s not that it’s difficult, working with a new squad, or that Kate wishes that Clint were there holding her hand, because it’s not and she doesn’t. Kate’s a good cop—the guys she worked with back in Vice didn’t call her Pete Rose for nothing—but this is something else. This is being dropped in the middle of the hurricane and being told to find your own center.

She is the new girl in a precinct filled with people who have been working together for years—with people who instinctively duck out of the way when Stark casually asks Banner if he has enough hand sanitizer; who just quietly nod their heads when Rogers talks about justice with that faraway look in his eye; who casually tune out Thor’s third-person rants on break-room coffee etiquette.

Clint doesn’t bother trying to explain any of it, but Clint brings her with him when he goes to checkout a warehouse in Brooklyn and he listens to her when she talks. He’s always one step ahead, already wherever Kate is going, but Kate doesn’t mind. She’ll get there too; she knows that.

*

In Brooklyn, they find more questions and not enough answers.

“This was something else,” Clint says, looking around and the burnt remains of the storage locker, putting together clues Kate doesn’t even see yet. “This was personal.”

“If you didn’t even know about this place, did anybody?” Kate wonders aloud. Her flashlight lands on what looks like a trading card. It’s edges singed but otherwise relatively unharmed; Clint’s brooding face looks up at her from it. “Clint ‘Hawkeye’ Barton,” she reads off the card’s back. “Is that you?”

 Clint looks up from where he’s rummaging in the corner. “Yeah,” he tells her, dismissive.

“You were on the Olympic archery team and all you can say is ‘yeah’?”

Clint shrugs his shoulders, clearly unimpressed with how this conversation is going. “Yup.”

And Kate has a lot to say about that—well, mostly she just wants to say _what the fuck is wrong with you_ —but gets distracted by the thick manila folder she finds _Stark, Tony_ neatly printed at the top. “Wilson was keeping files on cops?”

“We tell no one,” Clint says, pulling the folder from her hand. “Not until we know what we’re dealing with.”

Kate knows what they’re dealing with—cops and secrets that someone attempted homicide in order to keep. Kate hopes that Clint knows what the hell he’s doing.

*

There isn’t really time to look at it too closely, this whole _team_ thing. There’s a job to be done, and it doesn’t matter how many men Romanoff killed in Reno and is doesn’t matter how many times Stark throws a stapler at Rogers' head and it doesn’t matter that the only time Barton had looked at her like an object was when she presented herself as one. Someone put Wilson in the hospital with fifty stitches and a coma; everything else fades away.

Clint doesn’t bring up the storage unit, and Kate doesn’t push it, but it doesn’t matter anyways. Thor finds a lead and Tony figures out a name. Steve says, voice level and low and calm, “Alright, let’s do this,” and Fury says, “You’ve got a job to do,” looking like he’s a second away from suiting up himself.

“You good, Katie?” Clint asks her only once, strapping his vest against his body.

She nods. “Yes.” Clint looks like he believes her.

*

Shit happens. Kate kills a man. It’s a hell of a first day.

*

“It could not be your first day,” Clint tells her over drinks. The entire precinct is crowded into this crappy bar, too many people for the mood to turn somber.

“I haven’t slept since I met you,” Kate points out. “I’m still wearing hooker underwear.”

Clint leers at her, but when he puts his hand on her shoulder, there’s no intent behind it. “You did good, girly-girl. First day or not.”

Kate thinks that she killed a man who killed a cop, but that she’s arrested plenty of people with pure intentions. But Clint’s smile is warm, and Stark had bought her a drink, and Kate has never been the kind of girl to go home and cry about it.

“Thanks,” she tells him, and she means it.


End file.
